


a slow invasion of the heart

by radialarch



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Resolved Sexual Tension, Skype Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-31
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-09-13 16:01:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9131524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/pseuds/radialarch
Summary: Yuri Plisetsky does not seduce so much as launch a full-on assault.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anaeolist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anaeolist/gifts).



> This fic is canon-divergent from the end of ep 10, and goes to the World Championships of the current season. Contains far fewer dick pics than I'd originally envisioned; sorry, Kathy.
> 
> Thank you to both idrilka and csoru, for all their enabling, and the entirety of my twitter feed for putting up with what was really a great amount of shouting.

Yuri Plisetsky does not win the Grand Prix Final. He doesn’t even _medal_ at the Grand Prix Final. His only consolation might be that neither does JJ, that insufferable asshole, and honestly — it’s a small one, all things considered.

Yakov makes him go to the banquet, which he stays at for about ten minutes. Viktor and Katsuki keep making eyes at each other in a way that’s frankly disgusting, while Giacometti swaggers around like his medal’s a direct line to his dick. So while Yakov’s talking to Mila and half the room’s distracted by Chulanont’s latest stupidity, Yuri downs a flute of champagne, swipes another for later, and slips out the door.

He’s not going to end up crying in the bathroom or anything. The Euros are coming up, and the Worlds after, and he _knows_ he can win. He may have found his limits in Barcelona, but the one thing he can do is rewrite them. He’s been doing it all his life.

What was it that Lilia had said? Let your old self burn, and rise up stronger.

Still. He wanders through the deserted hallways nursing his drink a little bitterly, and is halfway wishing he’d thought to steal more when he runs into Otabek.

“Thought you could use this,” Otabek says, and holds up a nearly full bottle of the Brut.

Yuri stares at it. “I’m not breaking down because I lost this time.”

“I didn’t think so,” says Otabek.

“I’m gonna beat you at Worlds.”

“You can try.” Otabek calmly pours himself a drink. “Look, if you don’t want any —”

So Yuri holds out his glass, and lets Otabek top him up.

They end up claiming one of the empty conference rooms, facing each other across the table with the bottle between them. Otabek doesn’t talk, or make Yuri talk, or do any of the things he’d expected. Instead, he just looks at Yuri, and steadily works through the champagne, and, all together, remains stupidly mystifying.

At some point, Otabek has taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. And then he reaches up to loosen the triangle of his tie, and Yuri has _had_ it.

“Bronze,” he says. “Did you want congratulations? Because you’re not going to get it.”

“Wouldn’t want it,” Otabek says. “It’s my fault I didn’t get silver.”

Neither of them mention, Yuri marks carefully, the gold.

“So you’ll get it at Worlds,” Yuri says. “Giacometti can’t keep this up, he’s too old. It’ll be an embarrassment if you _don’t_ beat him then.”

“While you win the European Championships, and the Worlds, too?”

Yuri bristles. “What, you think I can’t do it?”

“Anything can happen,” Otabek shrugs. “I wouldn’t like you if you didn’t have a chance.” 

He’s standing up before Yuri can react to that. “What’s your Skype?”

“Why?” Yuri says, suspicious.

“Because I’m not texting Russia from Toronto.”

“I didn’t ask you to,” Yuri says, but that doesn’t stop him from sending himself an invite from the phone Otabek’s holding out.

“Well,” Otabek says. “But what if I want to?”

It’s too stupid of a question to answer. But as Otabek’s pushing open the door, Yuri does stir himself up to say, “You’d better beat JJ at Four Continents.”

Otabek doesn’t even pause. “Count on it.”

So he goes, and leaves Yuri with a quarter still left of the champagne, a Skype invite on his phone, and entirely too many questions.

———

When Yuri comes back to Saint Petersburg, he still hasn’t responded to Otabek’s invite. He ignores his luggage and falls into his bed, staring at the notification, and wonders if Otabek wants to fuck him.

It wouldn’t be a surprise. He knows Viktor and Giacometti were fucking for years, before Viktor lost his mind and fell for that Japanese idiot instead, and even when it doesn’t stick, there’s a lot of screwing around among the skaters. Competitions are boring, when all’s said and done, and sex is as good a way as any to keep the mind occupied.

He wouldn’t mind, he decides after some thought. He’s no stranger to well-formed bodies — his brain, infuriatingly, flashes upon _Viktor_ — but Otabek is pleasant enough to look at, and less irritating than most. Plus, he knows when to stop talking, and if sharing floors with Giacometti has ever taught Yuri anything, it’s the importance of finding someone who knows how to shut up in bed.

So, he decides, he’ll win Worlds, and then he’ll fuck Otabek, and the idea’s pleasing enough that he hits _accept_ on his phone and falls into sleep right after, without having unpacked a damn thing.

———

The problem —

The problem, Yuri decides, is that perhaps Otabek does not, in fact, want to fuck him. His conclusion goes like this:

  1. In the days since he accepted Otabek’s Skype invite, Otabek has sent him exactly one picture of a cat sitting on a snowdrift, and one Youtube link to a compilation of jumps from Yuri’s junior days, set to _Eye of the Tiger_. Interesting, but not a usual method of proposition.
  2. Toronto is eight time zones away from Saint Petersburg. If Otabek wants a fuckbuddy, this is certainly not a very _efficient_ way of going about it.



He’s still trying to decide whether he’s relieved or offended by this when Otabek sends him another picture. A shot of his training rink. Otabek’s pulled up to the boards, looking at something on his phone. There’s a girl beside him. She has a hand on his arm.

Yuri bolts up in bed and jabs at the _call_ button without thinking about it.

Otabek picks up with, “Shouldn’t you be _sleeping_?” Pause. “Turn on your lights, I can’t see a thing.”

Yuri, who can see Otabek just fine, does not turn on his lights. “The girl,” he says. “Who is she?”

“Laura,” Otabek says. “Rink mate. She’s an ice dancer.”

“Are you fucking her?”

Otabek looks taken aback. “She’s seeing someone,” he says. “Hockey. Very Canadian. Very big.”

“That doesn’t mean —”

“Also,” Otabek says, “I don’t like girls.”

“Oh,” Yuri says, and lies back down. He’d considered the possibility, of course, but somehow it’s different hearing it from Otabek’s mouth. “I see.”

“Would it have bothered you?” Otabek asks. “If I was?”

The picture quality on his phone is not great, but Yuri’s pretty sure Otabek is starting to smirk. “I’m going to sleep now,” he says, shoving his head under his pillow. “Go back to whatever it is you were doing.”

“ _You_ called _me_ ,” Otabek reminds him, and hangs up.

Yuri would have liked to hang up first, on reflection, but it’s only a minor irritation in the larger scheme of things.

———

After that, Otabek starts sending Yuri more pictures of himself. Shots at the rink; a video clip, short and shaky, of him not quite landing a quad Lutz. In front of a Tim Hortons, making a face at a cup of coffee while two girls laugh at him. That one, Otabek captions, _don’t worry, they’re dating each other_. Yuri sends back _do you think you’re funny_ , and, because words alone cannot capture the depth of his disdain, refuses to answer Otabek’s messages for three days.

He doesn’t send back pictures often. Otabek follows him on Instagram, anyway, and it seems like admitting something to take photographs just for him. So he mostly just talks: short, idle thoughts he drops into the ether. _What’s Canada’s deal with this Tim Horton guy_. _Beat Georgi at nationals. Do you like cats._

(The answer to that last one is _yes_. Yuri finds himself briefly pleased by this, and then irritated at himself for being pleased.)

So he’d mostly gotten used to the rhythm of this, Otabek’s faint presence in the corners of his life, when Otabek turns it all upside down.

It's only another picture, really. It’s not even a good picture, just Otabek in some locker room. He’s clearly just finished working out — he’s flushed, wiping at his forehead with the back of a hand. His t-shirt’s ridden up, showing a flash of skin just above his hip.

Yuri gets the message as he’s climbing into bed and promptly drops the phone. The image is still there, though, staring up, so he shoves it under his blanket, then slams a pillow on top for good measure.

His dick, traitorously, does not care that he can no longer see the damn picture.

There’s nothing sexy about it, he thinks furiously. Yuri is an athlete. It’s a sight he should be used to; it’s not like he’s never seen Georgi after practice, or Viktor —

Thinking about Viktor does _not_ help the problem. Yuri snarls and digs his phone back up, sliding a hand into his boxer-briefs, and ends up bringing himself off before the screen has time to dim.

And okay, maybe it feels good for about five seconds. Then his brain comes back online and reminds him that he just jerked off to a slightly out-of-focus picture of Otabek, which is humiliating for several reasons, not least of which is that Otabek has surely never jerked off to a picture of _him_.

He wipes himself clean with a handful of tissue and considers, carefully, his options.

———

The picture Yuri sends back, in the end, is not particularly explicit. He’d thought about a straightforward dick pic, but there are too many ways that can go wrong; he has no idea about Otabek’s preferences. The lighting. Clothing, yes or no. Whether he should be touching himself, and how.

So this is easier. Just a shot of his midriff while he’s lying in bed. He has one thumb slipped under the waistband of his tights, pulling it slightly askew over the jut of his hipbone. The dip of his navel is clearly outlined underneath his shirt gone translucent in the light.

Not exactly pornographic, Yuri admits, but, well. There’s a promise to it, anyway.

He sends it to Otabek before he can change his mind. Sometimes he can catch Otabek over his lunch hour, before he starts afternoon practice. He swipes through Instagram while he waits, scrolling past a dumb picture of Nekola with that idiot Crispino and an even dumber picture of Viktor and his dog trying to kiss Katsuki from both sides, and has to admit half an hour later that he’s probably missed Otabek.

He knows it’s not worth waiting up, from experience. Yakov will chew him out, and Yuri will yell back because his tolerance for nagging is shit without sleep, and then he’ll end up being assigned to stupid repetitive drills, “for your own good, Yura,” and at the end of the day he’ll be wanting to gnaw his arm off out of sheer boredom.

Better, then, to sleep now. He can check on Otabek’s response in the morning.

———

The flaw in this plan:

Otabek does not respond in the morning.

Otabek does not respond for _an entire week_.

———

Yuri has blown well past uncertainty into cold fury by the time Otabek calls. It’s early morning, which means evening in Toronto. He’s half-tempted to just not pick up, but then Otabek might just think that they’ve missed each other by accident, and he wants to be perfectly clear.

“Listen, asshole,” he starts, “if you didn’t want to fuck, you should’ve just said so, instead of wasting all this time, and anyway, the picture wasn’t even that dirty, so even if you didn’t like it —”

“I liked it,” says Otabek.

“What,” Yuri says, thrown. Talking to Otabek, he keeps finding, is a bit like missing the triple axel: unexpected, and leaving him briefly without a clue of which way is up.

“I _liked_ it,” he says again, slower, and faintly strained in a way that has Yuri squinting closer at the screen, trying to see if he can make out Otabek blushing under the pixels. 

“Then —” Yuri glowers, and hopes it comes through clearly. “What’s your _deal_? You could’ve texted me back, or done, like, anything. You fucking ghosted!”

Otabek actually puts his face in his hands. “Yuri Plisetsky,” he mumbles, “you are a force of nature.”

This, Yuri decides, is almost pleasing enough to serve as an apology.

“I didn’t actually think — look, I asked if you wanted to be friends because I thought it’d be easier.”

“Than fucking?”

Otabek _is_ turning visibly pink now, to Yuri’s delight. 

“My last boyfriend,” Otabek says. “He broke up with me, okay? He couldn’t stand long distance. We never had time to talk, and I didn’t have anything to talk about except training, anyway. This was supposed to be less — complicated.”

He ends with a vague wave, presumably to encompass the complexity of the thing. Yuri is unimpressed. “Your last boyfriend was a jackass. We talk about training, I don’t see the problem.”

“You think this will work?”

“Yes,” Yuri says promptly. “You’re not stupid — well,” he amends in the light of latest events, “less stupid than the others. Interesting. And anyway, I’ve already jerked off to a picture of you, so we might as well keep going.”

He says that last mostly to probe for a reaction, and is not disappointed. Otabek makes a sound not unlike a cat choking on a hairball, dropping briefly out of view, and when he comes back his voice is still a fair bit higher than normal.

“You did, huh.”

Easier to talk, now, in familiar territory. “You did too, don’t pretend. You should send me a better picture, though. Shirtless, at least, what’s the point otherwise?”

To his credit, Otabek does not point out that Yuri had been, in fact, completely clothed for his. Instead, he tips his head up and says, mock-scandalized, “Plisetsky, are you asking a world-class athlete for _nudes_?”

“I,” Yuri says with dignity, “am going to practice. You can do whatever you want.”

———

(Otabek does send him a picture, later, of him halfway through taking off his shirt. Yuri can’t see his face and there’s a nasty looking bruise spreading down his side, past the line of his boxers. Took a fall, probably. By all rights, it shouldn’t be a good picture. The letter of the thing, not the spirit.

Yuri jerks off to it, _twice_ , and can’t decide whether it’d be better if that’s what Otabek had intended all along.)

———

Once, Yuri had gotten hold of Viktor’s phone while he was getting yelled at by Yakov. It wasn’t very interesting — he’d snapped a picture of the two of them and posted to Viktor’s instagram, captioned _#practice_ , but that had been about it.

“There’s nothing fun in here,” he’d muttered when Viktor finally escaped Yakov and held out his hand. “A thousand pictures of your dog, seriously? You don’t even have any pictures of people.”

“What, were you hoping for a little more scandal?” Viktor had said, amused. “It’s better to stick with memories than pictures, Yura, you should know that by now.”

Maybe it worked for Viktor. But for Yuri — this is all he has.

———

The thing is: they don’t actually trade that many pictures.

Security is a bitch, first of all; there are always horror stories of some idiot who never disabled cloud sync and then got hacked afterwards, and even if they don’t save anything on their phones, data is currency nowadays. When apps like Snapchat are rethinking whether to actually delete pics from their servers, it’s only reasonable to be a little paranoid.

The second, Yuri thinks resentfully, is the entire concept of timing.

“The last time you texted, Lilia gave me a _look_ and told me there was a time and place for distractions,” he says. It’s late, but tomorrow’s an off day for him. “And you really don’t want Lilia to see a picture of your dick.”

“I’ve never sent you one,” Otabek says, which is true only by the thinnest of technicalities. He’s come mostly around to their — arrangement, whatever it is, but along with it has apparently discovered an infuriatingly contrary streak. Once, he’d sent along a picture of just a hand in stark lighting, nothing else in the frame. Maybe he’d been trying to prove a point.

Yuri had looked at it anyway, the taut outline of bone and tendons underneath the skin, and felt his mouth go dry.

“Besides,” Otabek’s saying, “I thought distraction was the point.”

“I wanna be distracted _properly_.” Yuri frowns. “We should just — Skype sex or something, that’s what other people do.”

“Well, you’re not like other people,” Otabek says frankly. “How would it even work? ‘Hey, Andy, taking half an hour off practice so I can watch my Russian lover jerk off in the locker room.’”

“Russian _what_ ,” Yuri says, wrongfooted. “Wait, I thought your coach was a girl.”

“Andrea, goes by Andy.” Otabek shrugs. “Fuckbuddy? Boyfriend? Take your pick. Or suggest something.”

It would have been easy, if they were just fucking. But Otabek had asked to be friends first, and — they are, Yuri thinks. He likes him. Otabek doesn’t bullshit, and he sends Yuri pictures of what seems like every cat in Toronto, and okay, he’s kind of hot, in a strong, broad-shouldered kind of way.

“Boyfriend, whatever,” he says, trying to not choke on the word. “But you’d better be _very_ distracting.”

“Aren’t the Euros coming up?” Otabek says. He’s pretending to be thoughtful, but Yuri’s pretty sure he’s hiding a smile. “After you win. I’ll call you.”

———

Yuri nearly does not win the Euros. He chokes on his short program, steps out of the quad Salchow — stupid, that after hundreds of hours of practice his body can still fail him like this. He ends up third that first day behind Georgi and a French idiot who obviously pushed himself too hard, but he makes up for it in the free skate. Barely a point between him and Giacometti, who ends up with silver yet again — barely a point, which means everything.

He gets back to his hotel room, collapses onto his bed, and stares at the medal clutched in his hand. European champion in his senior debut. The glint between his fingers is gold.

He can do better.

Otabek calls him the next day: after the gala is done with, and after Yuri comes in from the closing banquet, keyed up like he’s about to vibrate out of his skin. He’s just — he doesn’t know what to expect, that’s all. It’d leave anyone on edge.

So maybe when his phone finally lights up, he ends up blurting out, “Are you naked?” even before he’s had time to say hello. Whatever.

Otabek — clothed, as far as Yuri can tell — blinks at him slowly. “Don’t you want to bask first, or something?”

“Fuck basking,” Yuri says. “God. Why do you live in _Canada_?”

“Why do _you_ live in Russia?” Otabek counters, leaning in closer. “Let me see your medal.”

Yuri wraps the ribbon around his fist and holds it up to the camera. “You’ve seen one before.”

“Not on you.”

There, again, the sensation of falling. “I think you’re doing this backwards,” Yuri says. The ribbon stretches tight across his knuckles. “Aren’t you supposed to be convincing me to take stuff off?”

Otabek’s gaze is unwavering. A flicker of pink; the white of his teeth. “So do it.”

For a moment, Yuri is perfectly still. Not even a breath, while something like electricity chases itself in leaps down his spine.

Then he exhales, and slings the medal around his neck.

“You’re such a cliché,” he says, reaching up to pull his tie loose. “You like to fuck with the medal on, too?”

Otabek laughs, a little shaky. “Don’t tell me you don’t like it.”

Well. He works through the buttons of his dress shirt but can’t bother to shrug it off his shoulders. “Take your shirt off,” he demands, moving onto his belt. The medal’s a cool weight against the center of his chest; something to focus on, while the rest of him burns white-hot.

“I’m not the one who just won the Euros,” Otabek says, a half-protest, even as he peels off his t-shirt. His hair’s been growing out; he has to push it out of his eyes, after.

“So you should do what I want,” Yuri says. “What are you thinking right now?”

“That.” Otabek swallows. His hands come up, a quick, aborted motion. “You’re the most dangerous thing I’ve ever seen.”

The breath comes out of Yuri’s lungs in an instant. “Tell me,” he says again, leaving his pants to pool around his ankles so he can slide his hand around his dick. 

“You’re like a knife,” Otabek says, feverish. “A sword. Sometimes I think you have steel where your spine should be.”

“You think about me.”

“I think about you. I think about touching you. I want to feel what kind of heart lives between your ribs.” Otabek’s eyes are brilliant. Yuri couldn’t look away if he wanted to.

“You’re not a poet,” Yuri gets out before he spills over his fingers. He keeps his eyes open; his teeth click around whatever words come next, jagged in his throat.

When Otabek comes, Yuri learns, his eyes slide closed, just for a moment.

When Otabek comes, he leaves teeth marks on his bottom lip.

Yuri’s heart is thumping hard, like he’s just finished a flawless run of _Allegro Appassionato_. He wills his head to clear and hopes it doesn’t come out too ragged when he says, “At Worlds.” 

The medal’s grown hot to the touch, now. He doesn’t miss the way Otabek swallows when he brings it up to his mouth and flicks his tongue out to lick at the edge.

“At Worlds,” Otabek repeats, strangled.

“You should bring your motorcycle.”

It’s stupid, really, how the sound of Otabek laughing can light up something bright in his chest.

———

Back to Saint Petersburg, for Yuri, to train for Worlds, while Otabek’s still preparing for Four Continents. They don’t talk much when they get this busy. He sends Otabek a picture of the river, once, when the slant of light reminds him of Barcelona; Otabek uploads a video to his Instagram, ten seconds of him and a sleek black cat staring at each other, and tags Yuri in it.

Two weeks after the Euros, Yuri finds a stream for the Four Continents men’s free skate over lunch and watches Seung-gil Lee edge Otabek off the podium.

It’s deserved; Otabek had tried for the quad Lutz. He’d known it’d be a gamble — he’d told Yuri he hadn’t been landing it as consistently as he’d have liked in practice — but he’d decided it was a risk worth taking.

He’d let it get to him, when he missed the landing.

Yuri doesn’t call Otabek until he’s out of afternoon practice. It’s late in Taipei, but Otabek picks up after the first couple of rings anyway.

“Couldn’t beat JJ,” he says in lieu of a greeting.

“Shut up,” Yuri says, suddenly irritated. “Are you feeling sorry for yourself or something?”

“Shouldn’t have tried the Lutz,” Otabek says. Yuri can nearly hear him shrug on the other end. “I didn’t think — I knew it wasn’t ready.”

“No,” Yuri says. “You should have.”

Otabek pauses. “I lost.”

“And if you hadn’t done it, you’d be holding bronze, and you’d go to Worlds with your toe loop and Salchow because your Lutz still wouldn’t be good enough, and maybe you’d even medal. And after all that, no one would remember your fucking name.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

Just this afternoon, Yuri had taken a fall in practice — taken more than one, the ice kissing bruises all across his side, and he’d gotten up, and felt the point of his left hip ache like a warning, and kept going. 

You couldn’t be beautiful without risk. He thought Otabek had known that.

“You don’t do this to be boring,” he says, and hangs up.

A week later, Otabek posts a video of a clean quad Lutz from his home rink. _Looking forward to Worlds_.

Yuri lets it loop twice before he hits _like_.

———

 _Are you here_ , he messages Otabek when the Russian team gets into Boston. Worlds is a far bigger affair than the Grand Prix, which mostly means a lot of people he doesn’t know. Harder to find someone specific when the lobby is a garish explosion of flags.

 _Got in a couple hours ago_ , Otabek answers back promptly. _Want to go somewhere?_

“Yurio!” Viktor, unmistakable even in a crowd. Yuri glowers in his general direction and ducks behind a passing luggage cart.

 _Yes_.

Otabek, it turns out, did bring his motorcycle.

“It’s a rental,” he corrects, tossing him a helmet. “Too much of a pain to ship mine around. I thought you’d like it anyway.”

Well. He’s not wrong. 

“Maybe,” Yuri says grudgingly, fastening the clasp under the point of his chin, and climbs onto the bike behind Otabek. After months of chat and Skype, it’s almost startling to sit flush to Otabek’s back, his hands on his hips, and find him solid after all.

“You got plans?” he shouts as the engine flares to life. 

Otabek says, “You.”

———

Boston is a city overly steeped in its own history. Yuri is unimpressed, but it also means the city’s content to ignore them both. They end up a decent distance upriver, on a bridge they reach by foot, watching the water go by.

The men’s short program won’t be for a couple more days. The fact of it lies between them almost like a live thing, but Yuri doesn’t want to think about it just yet.

“Tell me something about yourself,” he says instead, nearly surprising himself with it. Otabek looks startled too, for a moment, before he smiles.

“Back in Almaty,” he says, “I have a sister. Very small. She’s disappointed she can’t come see me here.”

Yuri’s not used to sharing his life with anyone else; but the turn of Otabek’s mouth is very fond.

“She likes you. Your skating. She calls you the ice fairy.”

They call Otabek _hero of Kazakhstan_ in the newspapers. He’s grown into the title, Yuri thinks: the promise of power coiled neatly along his muscles, the set of his shoulders. The guy owns a motorcycle, for fuck’s sake. A couple centuries back and it would’ve been a horse.

Yuri has a faint, steady ache tucked into the arches of his spine these days; sometimes, in the mornings, it feels like his femurs have been twisted sideways out of their sockets. He’s growing out of his own story, with a terrifying inevitability, but he doesn’t know where to.

“Good luck,” he says impulsively, holding out his hand. “In the competition.”

Otabek clasps it without hesitation. “And you.”

———

In the end —

In the end, it’s not luck that wins Otabek the gold. It’s not even the quad Lutz. It’s something in his performance — the commentators call it “a newfound surge of confidence,” but Yuri thinks maybe it’s just that Otabek has finally learned how to stop performing and _be_.

Yuri, who takes a fall on the quad toe loop and ends the free skate with his vision gone gray, desperately trying not to vomit, places third.

“Bronze is fine, for your senior debut,” Yakov tells him; “Viktor placed third his first year,” Mila says, like that’s a comfort. Yuri scowls at them both until they get tired of him and leave him to brood in his room.

So. That’s where Otabek finds him.

He knows it’s Otabek knocking even before he opens the door. He thinks, briefly, about not answering, then changes his mind.

Distraction. He’d like a distraction.

“Yuri,” Otabek says when he opens the door, and, gratifyingly, stops talking when Yuri grabs a fistful of his shirt and yanks him inside.

It’s the first time he’s kissed Otabek. It’s the first time he’s kissed anyone. There’s too much teeth, and it’s messy, and Otabek keeps trying to _talk_.

“I’m not gonna tell you all my — feelings or whatever,” he says, exasperated, when Otabek gathers up his wrists in his hands. “If you don’t want to fuck you should just leave.”

“If I —” Otabek frowns. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“I’m taller,” Yuri spits out, and promptly tries to swallow it back.

Already, he and Otabek are nearly of a height; he might even grow past him by the end of the summer. He feels like he’s about to split out of his skin — a butterfly, but in reverse, turning into something far more awkward.

He has always been at war with himself, and time. He’d almost convinced himself it wasn’t a hopeless cause.

Otabek lets go of him and says, “Don’t be boring.”

Yuri nearly chokes on his outrage. “If I don’t have my body,” he snarls, “I don’t have _anything_.”

“If you don’t have your body,” Otabek says, “you still have this.” His hand, outstretched, presses itself flat over Yuri’s heart.

Otabek must feel the way his heart is pounding; must be able to see the flutter of his pulse in his throat. Otabek’s gaze is as sharp as a scalpel. It’d almost be easier, Yuri thinks, if he’d just cut him open.

“Your body’s only a weapon,” Otabek says. “The tool doesn’t make the soldier.”

“Are you trying to tell me I can — relearn, I can get used to it,” Yuri says, brittle. “Don’t be stupid. Not everyone does.”

“But not everyone is you,” Otabek says. “Yuri Plisetsky.”

Otabek has always said his name like a title — like an honor that he’s earned.

“Next year,” Yuri says, and breathes for what feels like the first time in hours. “The Grand Prix.”

“Try to beat me.” There's the faintest hint of a smirk starting up on Otabek's lips.

“Not gonna stop at _try_ ,” he says, and pushes Otabek down onto the bed. “Tell me we can fuck now.”

Yuri was wrong, as it happens: Otabek does _not_ know how to shut up in bed.

———

_[A close-up of a medal, gold, lying on a Team Russia jacket.]_

**yuri-plisetsky** @otabek-altin you left something  
**otabek-altin** @yuri-plisetsky keep it for me until next time.


End file.
